ARM Holdings said on Tuesday that it is developing multiple IP solutions based on the 64-bit ARMv8 instruction set. The company has already begun to license its second-generation 64-bit cores and will address new markets with other ARMv8 architecture-based solutions in the future.

“In Q2 we started licensing new technology roadmap products that we have not actually announced yet,” said Simon Segars, chief executive officer of ARM during an earnings conference call on Tuesday. “Today these [products] go by the code-names of ‘Maya’ and ‘Artemis’.”

Quite naturally, the chief executive officer of ARM did not reveal any details about the code-named Artemis and Maya solutions. What he did say is that Artemis and Maya are among many other 64-bit products that ARM’s engineers are designing right now.

“Artemis and Maya are the fruits of the investment that we have made in R&D over the years,” said Mr. Segars. “Artemis and Maya are just two of the things that are coming out now, but we have many investments going on in many different product lines to help us drive the business forward.”

ARM’s stronghold is the market of mobile system-on-chips for smartphones, tablets, navigators and other consumer electronics. Since the company’s primary focus remains on products for those devices, it is highly likely that the code-named Artemis and Maya are new ARMv8-A 64-bit cores that will substitute the Cortex-A53 and the Cortex-A57. If this is the case, then ARM will continue to have a "big" and a "little" core for high-end and low-cost SoCs as well as for hybrid Big.Little offerings.

Going forward the company plans to address automotive, datacenter, networking as well as Internet-of-things markets.

“These are new markets which have much growth ahead of them we believe, many changes ahead of them,” said Mr. Segars. “We believe the products that we’re building will allow us to take a very large share there. So this investment, this continued investment in R&D is really important to us.”

Discussion

Unless ARM holdings gets some wide order superscalar ARMv8 reference designs out there that can execute more than 3 IPC, Arm Holdings will have to rely more on its Top Tier Architectural licensees. The Apple Cyclone, and the Nvidia Denver, and AMD(hopefully soon with AMD graphics), custom ARMv8 ISA based licensed clones will be the ARM chips that will control the Tablet and Netbook mainstream market, who Knows exactly what Apple and Nvidia are doing under the hood with their respective custom microarchitectures, that implement the ARMv8 ISA, and ARM holdings needs to get some wider order Reference designs going, unless ARM Holdings is satisfied with the status quo.